


How to Keep Time

by aileenrose



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Clockmaker!Dean, Fluff and Angst, Homeless Castiel, M/M, Steampunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-30
Updated: 2015-01-30
Packaged: 2018-03-09 16:31:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3256757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aileenrose/pseuds/aileenrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's just beginning to learn that some times are more precious than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Keep Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Prizzlesticks (Maeleene)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maeleene/gifts).



> The long-unfulfilled prompt for the lovely maeleene:"steampunk AU where Dean repairs clocks and clockwork mechanics, and homeless!Cas takes the broken pieces he throws out and makes pieces of art back in his poorman's hovel."

His shop is located in the midst of the busiest street in London. At noon, the whistles sound in the factories; men and women and children emptying out of their grimy workplaces in torrents. Across the river, the cathedral’s church bells could be heard. In Dean Winchester’s shop, there’s the spin of gears, the tick of hands, the unified chime of his hundreds of perfectly-timed clocks singing out the hour.  

                Dean doesn’t pay much attention to the going-ons beyond his shop. He spends most of his time at his workbench in the back room, the same place where his mother once sat, perfecting the custom clocks that his rich customers desire. Springs, gears, clockhands, pendulums. Elegance, aesthetics, gold trimmings, mahogany lacquer. All around him, the ticking of clocks.

                His shop is small and cramped, grandfather clocks towering high at the walls, hanging clocks with carved maidens and grazing deer that appear, dream-like, between the tolls that tell the hour. Pendulums swing, reflecting in glass clock faces, sending up shards of light that dart over floors and faces. His customers are often amazed, open-mouthed, disoriented.

                All around them, the ticking of clocks.

                Practicality reigns. Dean’s apprentices—when he keeps them—are ordered to stand at the door, sending away those who gape too long, whose clothes are too shabby. His shop is small and cannot fit many. Better to entertain the rich, send away the fascinated and penniless passersby. Dean is successful enough that he can be choosy with his customers.

                He’s choosy with his apprentices, too. The last one, Brody, accidentally let slip how Frederick Alistair had been trying in vain to copy Dean’s latest invention—rotating clock faces: simple, ingenious, slipping from pearly pink in the early morning hours to a deep, midnight blue.

                Dean had pinned him with a stare. “And how do you know what Frederick Alistair is attempting?”

                Brody had stared, flushed red, and then said he supposed he shouldn’t bother to come back the next day.

                Frederick Alistair’s business rivaled Dean’s in longevity, if nothing else. Before Dean’s shop, the Alistair name had been synonymous with old money and rich taste. His traditional clocks are still popular, of course, but Dean’s popularity has only grown stronger with time. Dean would relish the competition if Alistair wasn’t stooping to send his acquaintances to work in Dean’s shop, trying to steal away his ideas and, eventually, his customers.

                Because Dean didn’t trust anyone to protect his shop better than himself, he often walked around the bottom floor after close, assessing that everything was in the right place, cleaning fingerprints from the glass.  He’d make sure the door was firmly closed, iron bolt slid home, and then afterwards he might spend hours in his back room, making sure everything was perfected, precise, absolute.

                What he couldn’t salvage—anything that didn’t live up to the Winchester namesake—he threw out. There was an alley behind his shop, and many of the other business owners up and down the way harbored no reserves with leaving their rotting food, their useless junk, right outside their door there. They didn’t seem to care that it could potentially be picked through, scavenged.

                So it’s one particular night that Dean finds that he was right, that people certainly did go through his trash, certainly did rifle through with _intent—_

This night, Dean opens the back door abruptly, letting it bang open, as he heaves a bag of old, worthless machinery behind him. Outside, the smog has descended, and the alleyway is dank and slightly eerie. There’s a shuffling sound and, when he turns, he sees the dark shape of someone moving there.

                “Hello?” Dean barks out.

                The shape stops and then, hesitantly, comes forward out of the shadows. There’s a man there, dressed in patched but neat clothes, with a shadowed jaw and untamed hair. Dean is surprised by the way the man looks him right in the eye, without shame.

                “What were you doing, going through my trash?” Dean demands.

                The man shrugs. “Often people throw away something that is useful to another.”

                Dean squints in the darkness. It’s possible that this is another ploy of Alistair’s, sending someone skulking around his house in the night. There are other rival clockmakers, not so rich or wearing to the nerves, who are just as curious. Azazel. Crowley. There are many people who would like to steal Dean Winchester’s business away from him.

                Such a train of thought makes his next question seem more warranted.

                “Who do you belong to?” Dean asks.

                The man quirks his head. “I don’t belong to anyone,” he says, matter-of-fact.

                Dean shifts in the doorway. “Well—well it still doesn’t give you permission to be back here,” he says. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

                The man, he notices, as his eyes adjust to the gloom, is just the wrong side of thin. His shirt has no buttons, no scarf; Dean can easily sketch the lines of his collarbone in the darkness. He quickly looks away.

                “Probably what you have in that bag,” the man observes, looking at it briefly before looking Dean in the face again. “But I doubt you’d give it to me.”

                “You’re right,” Dean says. “And you should know that _this_ —” He shakes the bag, so they can both hear the metallic ring of cracked gears, warped pendulums, striking each other—“will not help you learn a thing about Winchester clocks. You are wasting your time.”

                “All right,” the man says, and he continues to stand there, looking seriously at Dean, until Dean turns and drags the bag back into his shop, locking the door loudly for emphasis.

**

                He sees the man again, almost a week later, scrounging in the alley. Dean is dragging two bulging bags behind him, springs, screws, broken glass, and he sighs when he sees the man kneeling in the potato peels he threw out earlier, sifting. When the man sees Dean there, he stands up, straight-backed, and silently looks at him.

                “These parts are broken,” Dean says loudly, like the man is deaf. “Worthless. Tell whoever wants them that they’re not going to learn anything about me, or my clocks, or the way I create them, not from my trash.”

                “ _I_ want them,” the man says. “And I don’t care to learn anything about your clocks.”

                Dean can’t help but draw himself up, affronted. “You do know who you’re talking to, don’t you?”

                “Dean Winchester,” the man says. “You make the most beautiful clocks in all of London.”

                That, at least, sounds sincere. Dean shifts. “What’s your name?”

                “Castiel.”

                “Castiel, what do you want with broken, worthless trash? It’s worth nothing.”

                “I can make beautiful things, too,” Castiel says. When Dean doesn’t reply, Castiel looks around, seeing that Dean has left nothing of value for him out there. He nods to Dean and walks away, and Dean continues to watch for him, even long after he’s gone.

**

                He is still wary of the man, his motivations, so Dean takes to paying a man to cart it to the poor quarter, in the area behind the hissing, clanking factories, where the refuse is burned.

                Even with this solution, he finds himself thinking of the man more than he thought he would. Why did this man think that Dean’s trash was salvageable? Dean is careful, mindful, only throwing away what couldn’t possibly be put to use. He can’t see the purpose in what the man wanted, and it bothers him.

                He notices, a few days later, an interesting occurrence. That evening, the man who he pays to take his trash stops at the side of the street. A few moments later, a familiar upright, thin figure emerges from the crowd. Something exchanges hands, and then Castiel is climbing into the back of the cart, rummaging through the trash there. Dean, standing at his shop door, can feel his heartbeat climb, pounding in his ears.

                Castiel, he decides, is a thief. A sneak. He is going to unimaginable lengths to secure Dean’s rubbish, and Dean needs to know why.

                The next week, Dean pays the man in the cart, as usual. But, after the man leaves, Dean locks the door to his shop and follows, watching as the man waits at the side of the street, watching as Castiel comes forward from the crowd of people, pressing a few coins into the man’s hands.

                He leans against a lamppost and watches as Castiel carefully selects broken gears, rusted screws, and thanks the man politely before leaping off his cart. He watches as Castiel pulls his shirt away from his thin chest, fashioning an apron out of it. How he carries his small burden like his shirt is filled with treasures, walking cautiously along the street, avoiding those closest to him.

                Dean follows him as the sun sets. He expects Castiel to walk towards Alistair’s shop, or perhaps to a merchant of some kind, dealing in metals, although Dean knew Castiel’s small haul would be turned away. Instead, Castiel leads him down alleys, side streets, for so far that Dean starts to wonder if he should give up, turn back. 

                The streets turn dark, become narrow and dirty, and Dean doesn’t think he’s ever been here before. Men skulk in the doorways, their faces obscured by pipe-smoke. A woman lifts her skirt from a stairway, exposing a thin, pale leg.

                Somewhere, Dean can hear a child crying.

                Castiel’s shoulders are just visible ahead, his shoulders straight, his step unhurried. He is not bothered, like Dean is, by the smell and the dirtiness. He belongs here. In the midst of all the unknown, the whistling pipes overhead, the clatter of a train not far away, Dean follow Castiel, a beacon in the gloom.

                Finally, Castiel stops in front of what Dean could only call a shack, a leaning structure of misshapen boards, mostly kept upright by the shoddy garrets that are pressed up against it from either side. Dean realizes it is nighttime, and he is far from home, and he has followed Castiel all this way only to find the sad circumstances in which he lives.

                Dean turns to leave, unseen, and it is then that Castiel turns to him, with his serious gaze, and says,

                “It’s too late to return home. In this place, at this time, you’ll be a target for pickpockets. Or worse.”

                He should feel ashamed, that Castiel has known he’s been following him the whole time. He could also be frightened, knowing that Castiel is speaking the truth. Dean is definitely out of his element. Instead, Dean swallows, uncertain of the ambiguity of Castiel’s dark gaze. “I have to go back,” he says. “Where can I go, now?”

                Castiel wrenches his door open. “You can come into here,” he says, and steps back to allow Dean to enter first. Inside, it’s dark.  There’s a pallet on the floor with a threadbare blanket, a table with one broken leg, a collection of glinting objects laying on its scarred surface. There’s a wall scorched black, and a small hole dug into the ground with for a fire, and a gap in the ceiling overhead to let the smoke out. In the corner, there’s a cupboard set in the wall, a bowl, and a jug of water, and a neatly folded rag on top of it.

                If Dean spread his arms, he could touch both walls with his fingertips.

                Behind him, Castiel shuts the door and turns to pick up a board from the dirt there, and Dean watches while he slides it snugly across the door, supported on either side by the encroaching walls. When he turns and meets Dean’s eye in the gloom, he smiles politely.

                “It’s best to be careful,” Castiel says. Dean nods.

                As Dean watches, Castiel walks up to the table, carefully emptying the contents of his shirt onto the tabletop. Then, without a word to Dean, he kneels and starts stacking kindling. After a few moments, there’s the sizzle of a match.

                “Would you like to see?” Cas says, and steps aside to let Dean look at the collection on his table.

                Dean, seeing, is speechless.

                There are tiny birds made out of interlocked gears, breasted with the beaten gold bob of a pendulum; there are bees, with delicate threads of wire acting as antennae, wings made of delicate, curved shards of glass; there are angels, each feather of their wings made from the precise point of a clockhand, angels with hearts made of pins, feet made of levers, hands carved from springs.

                And all of them, delicate instruments, could be turned with a key, their visible organs clicking and whirring within their hollowed bodies, their wings lifting and closing in the pantomime of flight.

                Dean lifts a careful finger. “May I?”

                Castiel nods, his eyes avid as Dean turns an angel this way and that, marveling at the subtle, clever whirring of gears.

                “They are,” Dean says, forgetting that he’s in some miserable shack, with a stranger at his side, in the poorest part of London. “Cas, they are beautiful.” And then: “Tell me how you make them.”

                Castiel’s voice is soothing, sure, as he shows Dean the crude tools he uses, the wondrous leaps his mind takes in order to create what he has spread out on the table before them. Dean ends up sitting on the chair, Castiel leaning over his shoulder, as they carefully perform an autopsy: with skilled, sensitive fingers, an angel is dismantled, prying away metal bands and slivers of springs so Dean can see the mechanisms within.

                At some point, Dean returns to himself, recognizing where he is again, what time it is. He looks up to see the fire dying, and the dark shadows beneath Castiel’s eyes, although the other man has been nothing but patient with him.

                “I should—”

                “You should stay,” Castiel says. “It’s dangerous here at night. You can sleep on the bed.”

                Dean looks helplessly around the room, wondering why he had thought this nighttime adventure, trailing the other man, could have led to a better situation than this. Why had he cared so much, that another man could make beautiful things out of what Dean considered trash? It has only led to him taking up space, taking up the man’s time. It wasn’t right.

                “But there isn’t any room—” Dean begins, rising to go to the door.

                “Dean,” Castiel says. He says Dean’s name without familiarity, just as a statement of fact.  “Please.”

                Dean can feel the color rising in his face. Penniless Castiel, begging Dean to take his bed. Asking to sleep on the floor. This wouldn’t have happened if Dean hadn’t been so ignorant as to follow him to his hovel here, the rich man’s complete disregard to the small hospitalities that the poor can afford. Cas has nothing to offer but his bed, and that is what he’s willing to give to Dean.

                Dean swallows. “Thank you,” he says. Castiel nods and leans past him, unfolding the thin blanket and spreading it over the mattress. Dean doesn’t say anything while Castiel tucks in the creases of the blanket, carefully plumps his pillow. When Castiel is all done, he gestures for Dean to sit down on the mattress, and Dean does.

                It’s hard and barely cushioned, but Dean barely notices. He pulls off his boots, setting them aside, and watches while Castiel lays himself out on the floor. His pillow is a balled-up shirt, and his toes are brushing the door.

                “Good night, Dean,” Castiel says, as kind and inscrutable as ever.

                “Good night, Castiel,” Dean says.

                He sees the trinkets on Cas’s small worktable glow and flicker in the firelight, bright treasures, before Cas smothers the flame.  

**

                The next morning, he is awoken by the crackle of burning wood, splashes as water is poured into something. Dean rolls over to find that Castiel has been heating a pot over the fire, making tea.  

                Dean’s back is sore, and he regrets it when he sits up too fast, feeling a twinge. He looks around the room, wishing Castiel had a clock here, some way of keeping time. The order to his days, the routine of waking and going to sleep at a certain time, have been jarred by this strange encounter.

 Castiel looks over his shoulder at him.

                “Hello, Dean,” he says. “Your shop will be opening soon. I can show you the way back there.”

                Dean nods. “Thank you,” he says, and they both are silent as Castiel dresses for the day, fills a frayed bag with the trinkets from his tabletop.

                To Dean’s dismay, his stomach rumbles, loudly enough to fill the small room, and Castiel gives him a considering look. “I can do something about that.”

                In the cupboard, Castiel takes out a small bundle wrapped in cloth, carefully opening it to reveal two slightly hardened rolls. He holds the bundle out to Dean, who knows better now than to refuse what little Castiel has to give. He takes Castiel’s example and lays his roll on the stone close to the fire, waiting a few moments before picking it up again, pulling the warm bread apart. Dean watches Castiel eat it slowly, comfortably, like a slightly stale roll is something to relish in. Dean feels ashamed.

                After  Castiel has wrestled the board out of the way, he leads Dean down treacherous narrow side streets, dirty, smelly, barely more welcoming than they were the night before. Dean notices the suspicious looks he receives as people begin to fill the streets—sooty-faced children, pinched-face factory workers. His hand strays for his wallet and he finds Castiel catching his wrist and pushing it away, all without looking at him, shaking his head.

                “They’ll know where you keep it in on you if you do that,” Castiel says.

                As the sun rises over buildings, tipping into the street, Dean starts to recognize where he is. He knows the bank on the corner, the stall hawking pastries. He knows the dark smudge on the horizon shaped from factory smoke, and the row of streetlights across from his shop.

                Castiel stops within sight of the clockmaker’s business.

                “You don’t need me past this point,” Castiel says. “Goodbye, Dean.”     

                “Wait,” Dean says quickly. He moves them out of the way, away from jostling pedestrians, and reaches for his wallet. “After last night, and everything you gave to me, you should be—”

                “I don’t want your money,” Castiel said, with a furrow between his eyebrows. “I didn’t do anything to be paid for.”

                Dean looks at him in disbelief. Everything in London is about money, about how time is money, about what to buy, and who to buy it for. Castiel, surely, even knows that—selling his clockwork angels, and his birds, and—

                “Then I have another suggestion,” Dean says, feeling his shoulders sag in relief.

**

                It’s a business decision, appointing Castiel as his newest apprentice. Castiel deserves reimbursement for what had happened the night before—and Dean doesn’t like owing anyone. And Castiel, who had previously been selling his ingenious trinkets to the poor, could learn some business sense. Dean’s customers can recognize art when they see it, and they can pay good money for it, too.

                Castiel isn’t initially convinced of Dean’s plan, but he hesitantly agrees to it. Within an hour, Dean’s sorting through his old, out-fashioned clothes, trying to find something proper for an apprentice in his shop. He finds Castiel to be a quick study, easily understanding the mechanics and function of Dean’s collection of clocks. Dean had felt quite proud, watching Castiel carefully touch the clock-faces on the wall, his expression rapturous.

                Castiel could learn about set prices and bargaining. He could learn the names of the clocks, their uniqueness or quality that make them so appealing to the wealthy customers Dean catered to. He’s an enormous boon in the after-hours, sitting close to Dean in the backroom and helping him to assemble springs and bolts; helping him to design new clocks, with empty chests, room for Cas’s creations to spring forward on the hour and delight. Dean promises Castiel that these clocks are his design, and because of that Castiel will make all the profit from them. Castiel just gives him a careless, strange look, like the prospect of more money than he could normally make in weeks doesn’t appeal to him.

                Sometimes Dean thinks that Cas _loses_ money, working with him, because as soon as Cas is paid he sees coins being slipped into the hands of a beggar on the street, a round-eyed child on the corner, like it’s more money than Cas knows what to do with.

                Castiel could show up on time every day, even with his long walk from his shoddy home. He could dress in the clothes Dean had provided for him, and could sell clocks with silent graciousness, and work close at Dean’s side for hours afterwards—the only time Dean ever saw anything close to a smile on his face, when Castiel saw his creations placed, like mechanical hearts, into the center of Dean’s famous clocks.

                The only thing Castiel can’t do, Dean learns, is adequately do his job at the door. There, Castiel is expected to turn away the poorly dressed, the penniless, to snub them in the face of the expensively perfumed men and women who expected to be waited on. More than once, Dean has looked up from his work to see an old woman leaving dirty handprints along his counters, or guardian-less children gasping with delight as figurines turned and clock faces spun and music chimed out on the hour.

                “They can’t even buy anything in here,” Dean tells him in frustration. “They only take up space.”

                Castiel nods, not quite looking at him, but Dean expects he’ll do nothing to change.

                Normally, Dean would have fired an apprentice for such behavior by now. He won’t do that to Cas, though, who will patiently sit in the back room for hours, candle burning down low, as he takes clocks apart and learns to put them together again. As he smiles softly in understanding when he learns how Dean can make sliding panels unlock and scroll apart, how to make birds spring forward from within the cavity revealed, carriages, the four horsemen. Cas makes delicate dragonflies with bodies made up of bolts, butterfly wings made up of gears threaded on wire. Cas makes art, and then he blows out the candle and walks in the darkness back to his home.

**

                “—let those children in when I’m not watching, I don’t care anymore. But don’t turn one of my regular customers away!”

                “Hasn’t she seen everything you have in here already?” Cas asks. “Why not let someone else admire your clocks?”

                “Because _she’ll_ actually buy something, instead of looking and touching and leaving dirty smears behind,” Dean says. “This is my business, and I’m asking you to not let anyone who doesn’t have two grubby coins to rub together—”

                “Then that would be me,” Cas says stonily. “I’m as poor as they come.”

                Dean hesitates. He’s never talked about this with Cas, when or why he became a scrounger, living in a shack that could be knocked over by a good gust of wind. Cas doesn’t talk about it himself, either. It’s sometimes easy to forget, with Cas’s gentle manners, his care of the clothes Dean leaves for him, that Cas is exactly the kind of person that Dean would normally turn away.

                “You’re different,” he says. “You’re special. You understand how to _create_ things. That’s a talent not many people have.”

                Cas looks at him curiously, almost unsure. “I’m different?”

                “You are, and it’s a _good_ thing,” Dean says. “You belong here. Other people might not, but you definitely do.”

                Cas nods, looking thoughtful, and walks away from the counter so he can go assist a customer across the room. Maybe it’s Dean’s imagination, but there seems to be a confidence in Cas’s walk now.

                Dean, for his part, has been noticing more about Cas then he thinks he should. His gentle, deft fingers. The tilt of his head when someone says something he doesn’t understand. He notices how Cas smiles with his eyes, and only when he’s genuinely interested in something, and the warmth of his shoulder against Dean’s when they work together on assembling Castiel’s clocks. It’s something he’s vaguely ashamed of, because  he knows that he notices things about Castiel, and he doesn’t think Castiel does the same. Is there a way he could understand Cas, intimately, in the same way Dean understands the tiny minutiae of the inside of a clock? Even though Dean knows almost nothing of Cas, his interests or his history or what he’s thinking, most of the time—he wants to. And that is strange for Dean Winchester.

**

                No one can understand how Dean Winchester did it, how he could make birds and dragons and angels with nothing but scraps of wire, rusted gears. There are stories written up in the newspaper, how strange and lovely his new clocks are. How Dean could take smoggy industrial London—it’s factories and smokestacks, its dirty metal and grim alleys; could take trash, unusable parts, and make something beautiful out of it. There are more people every day, lining up outside, pressing their faces against the window, gasping in delight as they catch the whir and click of movement inside.

                Not surprisingly, Dean draws the attention of someone he’d rather not. Dean, assisting one of the Duke’s nieces, looks up and sees Cas talking to a smug-looking Frederick Alistair, their heads bowed in conference together. Immediately, he feels his good mood deflate.               

                Cas doesn’t even mention it, the rest of the day. He seems unusually serene, dusting and polishing the faces of the clocks as evening falls outside. But Dean can’t stop thinking about it, what his biggest competitor would be doing, there in his shop, talking to his right-hand man.

                “Alistair,” he finally says, heavily. “I saw him talking to you today. I’m sure you know who he is.”

                Cas nods. “Your rival.”

                “Why was he here? What did he want?”

                Cas slowly rubs a spot on the counter. “He said he knew I’m your new apprentice, and he had looked into my situation. He offered me room and board, and living wages, if I came and worked for him.”

                Dean feels a hole grow in his stomach. There are too many things to lose, in what Cas just said—everything Cas has learned of Dean’s clocks and his designs, all of that secret knowledge, gone. Years of building the Winchester name, the one that started in nothing but a poor man’s hovel, Mary Winchester with her keen eye for gears and counterweights, learning a trade for herself. Gone. Castiel, his apprentice, his friend, still in some ways a mystery, stolen away—

                “No,” Dean says. His tongue feels thick. He doesn’t understand why Cas seems so calm, why he’s smiling. He turns away, trying to control his expression. He tries to think in terms of business, logic. “I can’t let you do that. What’s his price? I’ll pay more.”

                When he turns back, he’s immediately struck by Cas’s face. Cas’s small, brilliant smile has disappeared. As Dean watches, Cas’s jaw clenches tight, a muscle sliding in his cheek.

                “I think,” Cas says. His eyes move away, away from Dean. “I think I should leave.”

                “What?” Dean says. “Why?”

                Cas’s eyebrows furrow, frowning across the room.

                “I can pay more,” Dean repeats. The more he talks, the more Cas’s shoulders seem to draw in and up, around his ears.  “Anything, tell me what you want. What’s your price?”

                “I,” Cas says. He looks ashamed. “I thought I was special in some way. Different.”

                “You are,” Dean says. “You—” He’s not sure, anymore, what they’re talking about.

                “I told him no,” Cas says. He puts down his polishing cloth. “I told him you were my friend. But I see by your reaction that you don’t think of me the same way.”

                Dean should feel swamped by relief, but Cas still looks so upset.

                “I’m not a thing you own,” Cas says. Dean remembers what Cas said to him, that first day they met, _I don’t belong to anyone_. “I’m not your hammer. I’m not a thing you can buy off.”

                “You’re right,” Dean says. “Cas, I’m sorry, I panicked—”

                But Cas just gives him a disappointed look and walks past him, past the clocks that he and Dean built together, and out the door.

                He’ll be back, Dean reassures himself, as he watches Cas’s shadow slide down the street. Dean doesn’t know what else to think, besides that Cas would come back.

**

                But Cas doesn’t.

                Here is what Dean learns—that many people, besides Cas, think mostly in terms of money, time, wallets. Dean included. Frederick Alistair had paid someone off to follow Cas home, finding out where he lived. Just like Dean’s pays someone off, to find out what Frederick Alistair did.

                Alistair offered a position to Cas again, but Cas firmly refused. So Alistair had paid some men to tear Cas’s tiny, painstakingly neat hovel apart. Boards splintered. Table legs snapped off. All of his work, his precious, winged things of gears and cogs, stomped underfoot. They demolished the place. Dean knows, because he went to see it, and there was nothing there but a space between two shabby buildings, and—glimmering faintly in the sunlight— what Dean used to call broken, worthless trash, scattered in the dirt.

                And Cas, who couldn’t have had another place to go to, was gone.

**

                The days are long. Dean feels it in the long drag of each ticking of each clock. They seem to be running slower and slower.

                Dean’s spends his days at his shop. He has more customers than ever. Many want his clocks, his and Cas’s, the ones with birds and beetles and winged horses, crafted with grace and precision, gliding through the hours. But Dean can’t keep up with the demand, and he won’t try to make Cas’s creations himself.

                Oftentimes, even as he’s speaking to important customers, he finds himself thinking of other things. Cas’s warm shoulder, leaning against Dean’s in the dark of the shop, neither of them moving away. The smile in his eyes when some dirty, sooty pack of children would stand in the middle of the shop, exclaiming in awe. His feet touching the door of his tiny shack, lying on the cramped floor so that Dean could have the bed.

                In the evenings, when Dean would normally work on his new creations, Dean searches. He walks through train yards and behind factories and the crowded market. He asks if anyone has seen someone about his height, dark hair, blue eyes. But there are plenty of men like that in London. Dean could tell them other things, like the sureness of Cas’s fingers, and the gentleness of his smile, but he doesn’t think most people would notice that at a glance.

                Sometimes Dean worries about losing money, this way. Someone, somewhere, will find a way to replicate his clocks, and he hasn’t been working on anything new. He’s handing out money in train yards and factories and markets, begging them to remember him, Dean Winchester, and contact him if they see someone like Cas. It’s not exactly profitable.

                He finds he doesn’t care, though.

                He goes to sleep and dreams of Cas. In this dream he’s a clockwork man, with wings made out of brilliant, gleaming gears. It makes sense, this dream. He’s always been about to lose Cas, all along—Cas, who doesn’t belong to anyone. At any time, Cas could fly away.

**

`               It’s a cold, rainy night when Dean has a knock on his door. There’s a dripping wet boy there, his face familiar beneath his cap. Someone that Dean had paid to keep an eye out.  Within minutes, Dean has his coat and his umbrella and he’s following the boy out onto the slick cobblestones.

                There’s a man who lives beneath the bridge, the boy says. He’s very quiet, and very dirty, but there’s something proud in the set of his shoulders, even as he’s fishing trash from the banks of the river.

                Not too proud, though, to listen to Dean beg. There, in the dark shadow beneath the bridge, Dean tells him everything—his own poor beginnings, his fear of losing his mother’s shop. His memory of Cas’s table of beautiful creations, shining like treasure by the light of the fire, the dreams of Cas as a clockwork angel. He tells Cas about the memory of their shoulders brushing together in the shop, just that, or their hands moving together in the belly of a clock, a delicate dance around gears and levers and pliers and the brush of each others’ fingers.

                Dean wants that. He wants it more than he’s wanted many things over the course of his life. He finds it scary that the only way he can get what he wants is to beg: humbly, simply, with nothing else to offer—to offer Cas anything would mean being refused.

                He just wants one simple, humble thing—that Cas might come with him, that Cas might even stay.

                That’s when Cas says, “Dean,” his voice hoarse, and stumbles forward out of the shadows to take Dean’s hand.                

When Dean returns home, he looks back and finds Cas wavering on the wet doorstep, debating whether to cross the threshold. He looks exhausted.

                “Please,” Dean says. “Cas, come in.”

                But Cas shakes his head. He looks down, and Dean does too, at his bare, dirtied feet. Dean can tell how embarrassed he feels, by himself and his grime, and he can’t let that happen. He strides over and takes Cas by the shoulder, making him look up and meet his gaze.

                “Come in here,” he says, pulling Cas in, reaching past him to shut the door. “It’ll be all right.”

                He sits Cas down on the bottom stair. Leaves him there, finds his way into the dark kitchen and heats up a bucket of water over the fire. Cas is where he left him, head dipping between his shoulders, quiet on the bottom stair, when Dean kneels at his feet and gently takes one bare heel in his hand. They’re both silent as Dean lowers Cas’s foot into the water, fingers hooked around his ankle while he works a cloth over the blistered soles of Cas’s feet, the dirt between his toes. Dean circles the knobs of his ankles, letting the warm nap of the cloth drag slowly over Cas’s skin.

                Dean takes the foot out, dries it, puts it in his lap. Then he takes Cas’s other foot and does the same. Unhurried, gently, he works his thumbs into the arch of Cas’s foot, massaging until Cas lets out a low, sighing sound. He scrubs away the accumulation of dirt, leaving skin that is pink and clean and warm to the touch.

                When he looks up, Cas’s feet balanced in his lap, Cas is looking at him unguardedly, curiously.

                “You’re always welcome here,” Dean says. “You don’t need to be ashamed.”

                Cas shakes his head wordlessly, his throat bobbing.

                Dean thinks they have a lot to talk about, but he doesn’t do that just yet. Instead, he dries each of Cas’s feet with care, and then leads him upstairs, to Dean’s home, where Cas has never been before. Cas doesn’t say anything when Dean gives him nightclothes and turns the covers of his bed  back for him. His eyes look wet in the candlelight.

                Without any words passing between them, Dean closes the door behind him, and goes to sleep himself.

And all he can think of is smooth sheets and bare feet and a tired cheek on the pillow.

**

                They come to an agreement, not that there is much discussion about it.  

                Cas helps the customers during the day. He lets them all in, anyone who wants to see the beautiful, renowned Winchester clocks, even if they do nothing but gape and stare, even if the only thing they have to give is their wholehearted compliments. He smiles and presses coins into grubby palms and wipes away smudged fingerprints like there’s nothing he’d rather be doing.

                Cas works with Dean in the backroom in the evenings. They lean their shoulders together while Dean teaches him how to make revolving clock faces, to hang the pendulums of grandfather clocks, to install golden birds on springs that can sing. By the light of the candle, Cas’s sure fingers take things apart and put them together again, making the spikes up a dragon’s back from shards of glass, the fan of a peacock’s tail from an array of golden clockhands. Together, they make art. And then they blow out the candle and walk upstairs together.

**

                There is one small change to their routine, one that Dean thinks they will keep.

                The change is this—one rainy night, Dean leaves his bedroom and slips into Cas’s. The other man is awake, lying with his hands clasped over his stomach, like he was waiting on Dean all along. Silently, holding his breath, Dean approaches the edge of the bed. Cas is smiling at him—it’s small, but it’s there. These days, it’s always there.   

Dean’s hand falls into the pillow by Cas’s head, the depression making Cas’s head roll to the side, towards him. So Dean kisses him. They kiss like that for a long while, Dean leaning over the bed, his hand in the pillow, Cas’s face turned up to his.

Eventually, Cas grows impatient. He shrugs out of his pants and folds them carefully at the foot of the bed. His shirt too. And then he turns towards Dean, naked and trusting, and Dean pushes him back down into the bed and kisses him full on the mouth again. Cas is inexperienced but eager, fingers folded into the collar of Dean’s shirt as he tilts his head back and kisses Dean in return.

                Dean takes Cas’s wrist and drags his hand up, touching Cas’s fingers to Cas’s mouth, and he watches as Cas nods and parts his lips, wetting his fingers. Afterwards Dean takes their slick hands and they both work their fists over Cas’s cock, side by side, smearing the wet until it’s a frictionless glide, their knuckles bumping and rubbing against each other as they smooth over Cas’s skin.

                Cas is gasping in the pillow, letting out a breathless sound, and Dean’s lets up his grip for a moment, letting his hand settle over Cas’s, fisting their hands together. Cas’s hips twitch up, driving into their joined, clenched hands, and Dean doesn’t know where to look—his restless, bared hips, his head thrown back, the shivering skin of his stomach. He looks and looks and moves his hand in tandem with Cas’s until Cas comes over their fists, mouthing something lovely as he does.

                And Dean—Dean kisses him back into the pillow, petting the side of Cas’s face clumsily. He ruts against Cas’s thigh until he’s coming, too, until he’s mouthing something just as lovely into the curve of Cas’s smile.

**

                There are many ways to keep time, Dean thinks, measuring to or memorizing from, to savor or squander away. The tick of a clock, the count of a calendar, the cadence of breath. The pulse of that good steady heart that he can hear now, through bone and sinew, skin and nerves, from where his head is pressed to Cas’s chest.

                Happiness that is measured _here_ and _here_ and _here_.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope everyone enjoys, especially to the kind and wonderful and ridiculously patient maeleene.  
> Thanks to all!
> 
> paperclothesline.tumblr.com


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